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The Fallacy of the Fall in Paradise Lost

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2021

Millicent Bell
Millicent Bell*
Affiliation:
Brown University Providence 12, R. I.
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Extract

The old question: Why did Milton's Adam and Eve disobey the Divine Commandment? continues to provoke conflicting answers and consequently diverse accounts of the meaning of Paradiae Lost. That Milton's epic is, like King Laar, or Faust, or Moby Dick, a work able to sustain many seemingly-contrary interpretations—that in fact it contains them all to some degree—is clear to anyone who will reread the poem at intervals, following the lead first of one and then another critical guide. But this richness of implication has obscured the real logical handicap assumed by anyone who attempts to find the ultimate origins of the narrative action in what is familiar to us as occasion or motivation—in a word, in cause.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1953 , pp. 863 - 883
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

1 “The Theme of Paradise Lost,” Shelburne Essay, 4th Ser. (New York, 1906).

3 C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London, 1942); Edwin Greenlaw, “A Better Teacher than Aquinas,” SP, XIV (1917), 196-217; James Holly Hanford, “The Temptation Motive in Milton,” SP, xv (1918), 176-194; Charles Williams, introd.TheEnglish Poems of Milton (London, 1940); E. M. W. Tillyard, Milion (London, 1930).

4 Douglas Bush, Paradise Lostin Our Time (New York, 1945); John S. Diekhoff, MiltonsParadis. Lost (New York, 1946).

4 All quotations from P. L. follow the text of the poem edited by Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1935).

5 “As for Mr. Milton, whom we ell admire with so much justice, his subject is not that of an heroic poem, properly so celled. His design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous, like that of all other epic works” (Essay on Satire, 1693).

6 De DoctrinaChrisliana r, x, Columbia Univ. Press edition of Milton's works (New York, 1931-38), xv, 113

7 This Great Argument (Prineeton, 1441), pp. 143-150.

8 Paradise Lost (Chicago, 1940), pp. 158 ff.

9 Paradise, Lost and Its Critics (Cambridge, 1947), p. 43.

10 Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor (Chapel Hill, 1948), pp, 80-82; Merritt Y. Hughes, ed. Paradise Lost,Introd. pp. xxxiv–xxxv

11 Cf. De Doctrina ChristianaI, vii (Works, xv).

12 Milton's Paradise Lost, p. 46.

13 “Satan unavoidably reminds us of Prometheus, and although there an essential differences, we are not made to feel them essential” (Milton, p. 134).

14 “Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall,” ELH, iv (1937), 179,177.

15 Explicit in De DoctrinaChristiona,i, v (Works, xrv), but alee implicit in Paradise Lost though this has been energetically debated. The evidence for the Arianism in the poem has been comprehensively gathered together by Kelley, This Great Argument, passim.

16 De DoctrinaChritiana v, vii (Works, xv); Paradise Lost, v 469 ff.